A scenic lookout is located on the eastern side of Cockatoo Island, from which
the Sydney Harbour Bridge can usually be seen. The lookout is surrounded by
signage and temporary fencing, which loudly declares that there is nothing to
see here. Peering through the lookoutâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s viewfinder, visitors are presented with an
image of the Sydney skyline from which the Harbour Bridge has disappeared.
No landmark, no iconic structure, no familiar spectacle representing Australia.
The work is an image of absence and denial, presented at the Underbelly Arts
Festival, August 3â&#x20AC;&#x201C;4, 2013 by Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan.

We are grateful to Horst Hoheisel for allowing his work to be reproduced in
this publication.
We would like acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which this
artwork takes place. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, as well
as Elders from other communities.
Headings and captions in this publication use the font ZXX, designed by
San Mung. ZXX is a “disruptive font” that takes its name from the Library of
Congress’ listing of three-letter codes denoting which language a book is written
in. The code “ZXX” is used to designate “No linguistic content; Not applicable.”
The font is designed to be uninterpretable by text scanning software. z-x-x.org
We are very lucky to have been aided in this project by the technological
wizardry of Two Bulls. two-bulls.com. We’re also grateful to Will Dayble of
Squareweave for putting us in touch with Two Bulls.

In order to explain what I mean I will begin by recalling what is probably
the most well-known artwork representing the Sydney Harbour Bridge: Grace
Cossington Smith’s modernist painting The Bridge in-curve (1930).

Grace Cossington Smith, The Bridge in-curve.

/ 26

Can the Sydney Harbour Bridge really be made to disappear? Even if it were
dismantled by the government that built it, destroyed by terrorists, or erased
from view by artists using technological wizardry, could the bridge nevertheless
remain exactly where it is, despite its absence from view? With Nothing to See
Here (Removal of Sydney Harbour Bridge), Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan show us
exactly this: the bridge’s persistence beyond erasure. Accordingly, the artwork
is so much more than a “now you see it, now you don’t” spectacle induced by a
technological gimmick, though this is certainly where it begins for the spectator.
This artwork constitutes one of the most interesting images of the bridge yet
to be made—the first truly negative image of the bridge. The bridge is erased
from view, but not from our memory—hence the spectacle—and in fact remains
within the work negatively. As we will see, this is not only true in art but also in
reality.

/ 26
The Bridgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Negative Image
Timothy Chandler

This is not the bridge we know: the arch is incomplete and the pylons and deck
have not yet been built. It is an image of the bridge under construction, and a
typically modernist image, too, in that it represents the grandeur and excitement
of modern technological achievement embodied in the enormous steel structure
dwarfing the natural and older built elements around it. Yet, as an image of the
Sydney Harbour Bridge, the painting only has the meaning which it now has
for us because we know the bridge as a complete, operational structure that
has become central to the idea of Sydney as it is both lived and imagined. The
bridge that we live with and create images of in 2013 informs our experience
of this painting of its incomplete form. Unlike Cossington Smith and her
contemporaries, we now read backwards from our current image of the bridge in
order to recognise coherently this image of it under construction. The completed
Sydney Harbour Bridge hovers negatively over the image of its incompleteness;
we cannot un-know the bridge in its completed form. In the difference between
these two images (complete and incomplete) we find a meaning for this artwork
as a representation of the bridge.
Spiers and Ryan are not the first to attempt an erasure of the bridge, or at least
a part of it. In The Australian Ugliness (1960), the great polemic against Australian
buildings and cities, Robin Boyd provides a drawing of the bridge without one
of its rusticated pylons, which are purely ornamental and serve no structural
purpose. For the modernist Boyd, such unnecessary additions to this elegant
and powerful work of engineering are an example of the Australian tendency to
tart things up by adding superfluous and often aesthetically questionable design
features.

Drawing from Robin Boydâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Australian
Ugliness, p. 23.

Boyd correctly points out that the removal of the pylons changes the way we
see the bridge completely. Rather than being drawn to the ends of the bridge, our

What happens, though, when a large structure is removed from a city—actually
rather than virtually? As Marshall Berman shows in his account of modernity,
All That Is Solid Melts into Air, the experience of modernisation has been
twofold: unprecedented freedom and self-determination for both societies
and individuals coupled with a radical transformation of our social and natural
surroundings, often resulting in the destruction of many of the things we hold
dearest. The original instance of this transformation in an urban context is
Baron Haussmann’s modernisation of Paris under Napoleon III in the 1860s,
during which the mediaeval Paris of narrow, winding streets was replaced with
the modern Paris of grand boulevards. In the first half of the twentieth century
in Europe, many urban environments were destroyed beyond recognition
by bombing during the two world wars. In the second half of the twentieth
century, particularly in North America and Australia but throughout the world,
cities were rebuilt along modernist lines, with large international-style towers
replacing older and often smaller structures, shopping centres replacing high
streets, and motorways ploughing through once lively neighbourhoods or once
peaceful countryside. No doubt many people were displaced by the construction
of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. For those who lived in the Rocks at the time, it
perhaps constituted an exciting but ultimately unwanted transformation of the
neighbourhood. Since the start of the postmodern era, we have become very
nostalgic and resist strongly the loss of “historic” elements from our cities. The
bridge is certainly now one such historic element in Port Jackson.
This history of urban change takes an unexpected turn, however, after the
millennium ends and the World Trade Center in New York City is destroyed by
terrorists. This loss from the urban landscape and the resulting trauma are of a
much greater magnitude and of a different kind than those losses incurred by
the wrecking ball in the name of progress. (But this instance of destruction is
also categorically different to the immensely devastating and terrifying bombings
of the Second World War, most particularly those undertaken in Germany and
Japan.) For those of us who have never lived in New York City, the loss of

/ 26

eyes are now drawn to its heights and we get a better sense of how the bridge
works structurally. But this experience of difference is only made possible by
the actual existence of the pylons. Boyd’s sketch would have an entirely different
function if it were not for the fact that the pylons were indeed built and remain
in place today. The drawing would have no polemical content and no power to
estrange us from the image of the bridge that we hold in our imagination. By
removing one of the pylons from his drawing, Boyd alerts us to the fact of their
existence; accordingly, he would never be able to remove them completely.

/ 26
The Bridge’s Negative Image
Timothy Chandler

the Twin Towers from its skyline is only something experienced through the
differences of representations, for example in the old postcard that includes the
towers and the new one that does not. Their absence from the new image, as in
the film Zoolander (from which the towers were erased prior to its release shortly
after the attacks of 2001), is always noted, which is to say, the towers’ absence
in our images of the city gives the buildings a ghostly presence. Accordingly,
the September 11 Memorial on the site of the World Trade Center could not be
more fitting: two square, one-acre footprints left in the ground where the towers
once stood signify their absence.

This artwork is less about
So, when we look through Spiers and
Ryan’s viewfinder on Cockatoo Island,
what we see than about
what do we see? We do not say that we
what we do not see.
see Sydney Harbour; rather, we say that
we do not see the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
This artwork is less about what we see than about what we do not see. But not
seeing something in particular still requires the act of seeing in general. It would be
more accurate to say, then, that this artwork, while it may not be about what we
see, is still nevertheless and primarily about seeing. The object of seeing is images.
If we say that we do not see the Sydney Harbour Bridge, we are still nonetheless
“seeing” it negatively. Nothing to See Here accordingly presents us with the bridge’s
negative image, the image of its absence. Finally, the removal of the world’s most
famous steel arch bridge, though only momentary, could direct us to recall other
attempted erasures in Australian history, including, most especially, the doctrine
of terra nullius and the genocidal acts carried out in its name.

Lest we Forget; Let us Forget.
Ben Gook

If the Australian indigenous people died mutely—and I think we have cause
to dismiss this as nothing more than an historically symptomatic fiction—it may
well have been due to shock and trauma. Better yet, we could say that settlers
were imposing European ideas on a foreign land and were unable to hear what
they did not understand, just as they painted and organised the Australian scrub
and bush into an idyllic pastoral scene, far from its actual state. Taming Australia’s
“disorder”—its unfamiliar trees, bizarre fauna and “savage” inhabitants—entailed
a ruthless, arrogant and unsympathetic approach to all that was encountered.
The few celebrated cases where this did not happen—that is, where settler and
colonial people got along—are the exception that prove the rule: what was visible
vanished, what could be heard, silenced.
Six years after Firth’s ominous assessment, in 1938, a group of indigenous
activists gathered not far from Cockatoo Island to march—mutely—from
the Town Hall to the Australian Hall. It was Australia Day, January 26—one
hundred and fifty years since Captain Cook had landed, also not far from where
Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan’s Nothing to See Here (Removal of Sydney Harbour
Bridge) stands. The Aborigines Progressive Association—established by William
Ferguson, Pearl Gibbs and Jack Patten the year before—gathered to hold a “Day
of Mourning & Protest.” Its proclamation flyer says, in part, that they gather
to “make protest against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years.” The invite was not extended to settlers, with

/ 26

In 1932, the respected anthropologist Raymond Firth wrote that the
Aboriginal Australian showed a strange trait, one unlike that of their indigenous
counterparts elsewhere in the colonised Pacific. The indigenous Australian, he
said, “mutely dies.” The race would undergo a passive, silent, unremarkable
and forgettable death. So began the twentieth-century slide into forgetting
indigenous Australians. This would be one more entry in the ledger of what
Stanner called the great Australian silence. It would take just a couple of hundred
years of settler-indigenous contact—and within that span, just a few intense
decades of frontier activity—to decimate a people who had been in Australia
for some 40 000 years. In 2013, to look out from Cockatoo Island and see
Sydney’s settler landmarks—apparent icons of progress—disappear prompts us
to consider invisibility and visibility, forgetting and remembering, as well as the
entanglements of settler and indigenous Australians in the present.

/ 26
Lest we Forget; Let us Forget
Ben Gook

only “Aborigines and Persons of Aboriginal Blood” asked to attend. The day’s
proceedings were delayed by the official sesquicentenary parade through Sydney’s
streets, which was a “symbolic procession depicting 150 years of progress,” as
one contemporary newspaper report put it. Mary Talence wrote in her diary:
“For white people it seems like celebratin’ progress, but for Aborigines it was
about mournin’ everythin’ they’ve had to give up for white people’s progress.”
The dialectics between silence and noise, mourning and celebration,
remembrance and forgetting, presence and absence have been at play in
Australia since its colonial founding. From the colonial Frontier Wars, as Henry
Reynolds calls them, to the History Wars, the interactions between settler and
indigenous Australians have been marked by an anxiety about remembrance
and forgetting, belonging and dispossession. As one book—Uncanny
Australia—argues, something unsettling is at the heart of this settler nation.
Periodic flare ups remind us of the subterranean, unconscious tension here:
these may take the form of historiographic disputes, such as those over the
precise number of indigenous Australians killed by settlers and recorded in the
archives; or they may take the form of a sentimentalised political plea to make
reparations (little children are sacred, as we are told by the report that licensed
the “intervention”—coercive reconciliation—in Northern Territory indigenous
communities). But these patterns of awareness are marked by their own visibility
and invisibility. These issues periodically come to the front pages of newspapers
along the eastern seaboard, before disappearing again, remembered and then
forgotten in a tidal rhythm.
The foundational blind-spot of the nation is simultaneously fixated upon and
unseen as an absence. So, we might ask, how long does it take to forget what was
once present? When does presence become an absence? And can remembrance
make absence a presence once more?
Memory is not a thing, but a
Common imperatives to
process. Nations have diverse
remember—lest we forget—are
strategies—processes—of dealing
bound up in a redemptive myth
with the past, with collective
memory: forgetting; moralising;
of memory.
forgiveness; reconciliation;
commemoration. These are not mutually exclusive paths. Forgetting is
a necessary—if paradoxical—stage in remembrance. There can be no
remembering without forgetting. Although many speak out against forgetting,
this counterpart of remembrance need not be negative. Common imperatives
to remember—lest we forget—are bound up in a redemptive myth of memory.

And yet, uncanny, unconscious repetitions are at work, even if we are
conscious of history: how else to explain the proximity of recent measures
in remote indigenous communities—such as welfare rationing, heavy law
enforcement, land tenure changes and accusations of moral degeneracy—and
those of earlier generations, those shaming, dark days of stolen children,
religious missions, indentured labour and other enforced “correctives” likewise
licensed by moral degeneracy and modish, craven Darwinian anthropology and
science. How else to explain, too, the acute Australian fear of “invasion.” A myth
of terra nullius and fantasies of an Asian or Muslim “invasion” are constitutive
parts of Australian nationhood. The fetishisation of “orderly migration”—we
will decide who comes to this country, and the manner in which they come, and
so on—trades on a half-remembered, half-forgotten history of dispossession and
occupation, not least of arrival by boat. Nikos Papastergiadis draws these ideas
together to argue a peculiarly Australian matrix “combines the primal trauma of
colonialism, the ongoing ambivalence over the sense of place, and the doubts

Replica of HMS Endeavour, the vessel
commanded by Captain James Cook in 1771.

/ 26

Holding the traumatic or terrible memory in mind will mitigate its recurrence.
This myth says that only ignorant and ahistoric actors will do wrong; its
implication is that those who remember will redeem themselves and do good. Yet
British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips points out “to say that those who forget the
past are likely to repeat it is not to say that those who remember it will not.” The
horrors of the Nazi camps are the moral index of why we need to remember;
gripped by an anxiety about repetition, we cycle through endless histories of
those years (Hitler’s Women, Buchenwald in Colour, Nazi Henchmen and so
on, until the SBS schedule is full), fascinated and traumatised by it still, by the
passivity and power, by the horror and ignorance.

10 / 26
Lest we Forget; Let us Forget
Ben Gook

over regional security in the national imaginary.” So the decolonisation suggested
by a) Mabo and land rights claims and b) the “hordes” arriving by boat from our
north congeal into a fear that Australians would lose their backyards—on one
side to legal judgements in favour of indigenous possession and on the other to
a bulging immigrant population. The reality proved otherwise on both fronts, but
these are fertile ideas, still sustaining political discourse.
Australian historian and cultural
The fetishisation of “orderly
studies academic Chris Healy has
criticised the theatre of “forgetting
migration” trades on a halfand remembering” that accompanies remembered, half-forgotten
settler accounts of Indigenous history:
history of dispossession
specifically, Healy has in mind the
guilty “liberal” consciousness of
and occupation, not least of
public figures such as Germaine
arrival by boat.
Greer and Mungo Maccallum who,
at different points, have made
remonstrations about “not being told” and “never knowing” about Indigenous
history. In this drama, the (white) individual has a moment of revelation as they
suddenly become aware of something they claim to have never known. Something
is speaking through these repeated acts, even if the actors do not know it:
indigenous people are remembered as an absence in Australian culture, forgotten
as a presence.

These examples suggest that history and memory are not either remembered or
forgotten but often both, sometimes present in veiled form. As if in premonition
of what was to become their nation’s legacy, German philosophers offer us some
of the most fruitful insights into memory, history and how we live with ghosts.
Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Gadamer—all have stressed the importance
of forgetting for the living of life; for the individual, forgetting is necessary
to avoid the overwhelming onrush of memory and the past. So the equations
cannot be “remembering = benign” and “forgetting = malign.” The details are
more complex, less given to purified moral judgements. There are, of course,
varieties of forgetting, derived from conscious and unconscious motives for
historical exclusion—repression, oversight, misremembering, false constructions.
Andreas Huyssen, for example, argues that both Germany and Argentina might
be case studies: considering firstly, how Germany has forgotten/remembered
the Holocaust and, secondly, how Argentina has forgotten/remembered its
death squads and military dictatorship. To simplify, Huyssen argues that an early
moment of forgetting was necessary in both countries to prepare the ground
for a later engagement with these discomforting histories. Adam Phillips argues
similarly: “Enforced memory, like all indoctrination, is fear of memory, of what

11 / 26

This is not to say that Maccallum’s and Greer’s claims are without subjective
and objective truth. As historians have argued, indigenous histories were
marginalised in the century following Federation. Nineteenth-century histories
contain many mentions and invocations of indigenous history, even if we would
contest their characterisations today: they at least had Aboriginal presence at
their heart. Henry Reynolds argues that Australia’s twentieth century has been
the century of forgetting. He claims it is more contentious now to argue that there
was a frontier war. This forgotten and contested frontier war has been displaced
by the Anzac myth hoisted around World War I experiences as the “testing
ground” of the relatively young nation, and around World War II as the good
war. Against this, Healy wants to point to a cultural mode of remembering that
contrasts with the fact that, for many settler Australians, it is all too easy to forget
indigenous Australians—and then to forget their forgetting. Indigenous people
therein disappear, banished either to the past or to some nebulous “outback,”
from which they sometimes appear to play AFL football or to have a painting
hung in the National Gallery. So a paradox: “Aborigines are remembered as
absent in the face of a continuing and actual indigenous historical presence,”
Healy argues. This tension between invisibility and visibility maps in complex
ways onto a tension between threat and peace: the Aborigine with a land claim on
your suburban house versus the faraway kids and dogs and flies of the outback
delivered to us by news reports.

12 / 26
Lest we Forget; Let us Forget
Ben Gook

it might come up with, so to speak, when left to itself. To leave memory to itself,
forgetting is required; the time-lag, the metabolism, the deferrals of forgetting.
Forgetting has to be allowed for if memory—non-compliant, unmanufactured
memory—is to have a chance.” Forgetting, then, is not necessarily the worse
option. Indeed, the instrumental approach to memory and history forces silences
and gaps of its own—and these may be more dangerous or troubling. Phillips:
“What we are urged to remember is bound up with how we are being urged to
live.” As with all historical and psychic bargains, forgetting too may orient us to
the future. Voluntary and involuntary, encouraged and discouraged—memories
always have a future in mind.

We ought to remember the
If we forget that all national
foundings were violent, then we
founding of the Australian
ought to remember the founding
colonies came on the back of a
of the Australian colonies came
faith that the nation was vacant,
on the back of a faith that the
nation was vacant, silent, empty. Its
silent, empty.
inhabitants too—who, being without
recognisable “culture,” were a form of nature themselves—were silent, mute.
To forget this, to stuff those phantasms back into the unconscious, takes quite
a lot of cultural energy. Primary school kids know the first colonial encounters
took place not far from Harbour Bridge, by well-meaning racists in habits and
dog collars, puffed-up colonial sadists in red coats. What happened between then
and now, however, is a foggy history for most Australians. This breeds another
forgetting, a blindspot: the majority of indigenous Australians now live in urban
centres. Today, some of the biggest indigenous communities in Australia are a
short train ride away from Sydney in Redfern and La Perouse—but of course,
these urban “indigenous” are not real “Abo-rig-i-nes,” because the real ones
live in the desert, rape their children and live under military and bureaucratic
watch, apparently protected against themselves. In the cities, meanwhile, settler
communities use the past to enact their own profound revelations; at some
interval divined by publishers and newspaper editors, an opinion piece or memoir
will argue (again) “we were never told,” and so on and so forth. Between these
exclamations, settler Australians carry on, challenged periodically by artworks
such as Nothing to See Here. Scanning Sydney from this island, let us see how we
feel when one of settler Australia’s chief icons of progress disappears from the
landscape. What strangeness will come from this?
Individual transformations are admirable but insufficient—what needs
to be consolidated is a sense, not of indigenous Australians as other, alien,

13 / 26

unapproachable, as living on the other side of some unfathomable divide,
but present, similar, living with us. Memory and history, remembrance and
forgetting are drawn upon by settler/indigenous identities. So part of the move
to reorganise relationships between Australians is a settler recognition that we
must refuse to disown those uncomfortable parts of ourselves (including our
historical inheritance of privilege and violence) and refuse those tendencies to
dehumanise and construe indigenous Australians as passive, helpless or violent
subjects. We also need to challenge the purified racial categories here: indigenous
genetic heritage—as well as cultural inheritances—can be traced through a large
part of the “white” Australian population. This needs to be remembered without
forgetting—without devolving and dismissing—the remarkable historical,
anthropological and linguistic work to date on indigenous Australia and its
past and present: the indigenous “part” of Australia cannot be homogenised
into some mass of indistinct history, as if it had “died out” of natural causes, a
cultural repetition of the Darwinian selection ideas that caused so much damage
in past decades. We must remember not to forget the indigenous Australians that
are part of our present.

14 / 26

There is no bridge.
There were no Aborigines.
Want to claim asylum? No Australian mainland.
No drownings in our seas.
In Imperial England, no criminals.
No Brandenburg Gate after Auschwitz.
No Russian politics, only Russian ballet.
Nothing worth talking about in Tiananmen.
Nothing to broadcast from Taksim.
There is nothing to see here. Move on.
Nothing is happening.

15 / 26

Images
of the
Invisible

16 / 26
Images of the Invisible

The Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor), Berlin.

17 / 26

The Brandenburger Tor is going to be ground to dust. The dust will be spread
on the area of the memorial.
The area will be covered with granite plates.
As the memorial two blank voids are created, its double voidsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and this is the
actual memorialâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are hard to stand. But it almost shows the impossibility of
expressing the Holocaust by means of art.
German artist Horst Hoheiselâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s proposal for the Memorial
for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 1995.

18 / 26

At dawn on Aug. 19,
Muscovites woke to the
announcement on radio
and TV that an Emergency
Committee had been formed
to govern the country.
Then, for several hours, the
state-controlled airwaves
went dead — except for a
continuous loop of “Swan
Lake” that played for hours.

Images of the Invisible

No coverage of the 1991
Soviet coup d’etat attempt.

24 years after the Chinese
government’s bloody
crackdown on prodemocracy protesters in
Tiananmen Square, “today”
is part of a long list of
search terms that have been
censored on Sina Weibo,
the country’s most popular
microblog. Other banned
words include “tomorrow,”
“that year,” “special day.” By
Tuesday afternoon, the term
“big yellow duck” had also
been blocked.
No coverage of the 1989
Tiananmen Square protests.

When violent clashes broke
out between protesters
and police in Istanbul last
week, national TV channels
ran with other stories.
Broadcasts included a
cooking show, a full-length
documentary on Adolf
Hitler and, on CNNTurk, a
nature show about penguins.
No coverage of the 2013
riots in Istanbul.

19 / 26

Swan Lake.

Penguin documentary shown during
riots in Istanbul, June-July
2013.

Twitter image mocking Chinese
censorship of Tiananmen
Square.

20 / 26
Images of the Invisible

Pamela Curr, of the Asylum
Seeker Resource Centre,
described the report as “a
comprehensive package of
harm”.
“People will still drown. What
this [report] is making sure is
that people drown elsewhere
and don’t drown right in front
Cockatoo Island was largely
of us,” she said.
undisturbed until 1839 when
Response to the Australian
Government’s reopening of
offshore processing camps for Governer Gipps chose it for
asylum seekers, 2012.
the site of a new penal
establishment to alleviate
overcrowding on Norfolk
Island. Escape from
Cockatoo Island was rare,
not least because few
prisoners could swim.
Description of Cockatoo
Island’s use as a penal
establishment, 1839-1869.

21 / 26

Manus Island.

Cockatoo Island.

22 / 26

Director of the International Refugee Law Research
Programme at Melbourne University, Dr Michelle Foster
says the decision by Australia to excise the mainland from
the migration zone is unprecedented. “The only example I
know of in recent times is [when] several decades ago France
deemed part of one of its airports to not be France for the
purposes of asylum,” she says.

Images of the Invisible

A response to the excision of Australia’s mainland from the
Australian migration zone, 2013.

Police interventions in public spaces consist primarily in
breaking up demonstrations. The police consists, before all
else, in recalling the obviousness of what there is, or rather
of what there is not, and its slogan is: “Move along! There’s
nothing to see here!”
Excerpt from Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus, p. 37.

23 / 26

A European image of New Holland (Australia), c. 1681.

Anti-Iraq War graffiti is removed from
the Sydney Opera House, 2003.

24 / 26
Images of the Invisible

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III,
the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia.
Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or
in such ignorance of the land it occupied.
Now this coast was to witness a new colonial experiment, never
tried before, not repeated since. An unexplored continent would
become a jail. The space around it, the very air and sea, the whole
transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall
14,000 miles thick.
In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that it
would eventually swallow a whole class—the “criminal class.”
English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the “criminal
class” but if possible to forget about it.
In the whole period of convict transportation, the Crown
shipped more than 160,000 men, women and children in bondage
to Australia. This was the largest forced exile of citizens at the
behest of a European government in pre-modern history.
Excerpts from Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, pp. 1-2.